Noisy fringe pattern demodulation by an iterative phase locked loop

The phase locked loop (PLL) technique applied to demodulate two-dimensional carrier-frequency fringe patterns has been developed recently. Here we present an extension to the basic PLL scheme to demodulate noisy fringe patterns. This modified technique estimates the phase in the fringe pattern iteratively; that is, the first wavefront estimation is done using a flat reference phase and the second iteration takes the demodulated phase found in the first iteration as the new reference. The third demodulating iteration uses the second phase estimation as the reference and so on, until further changes in the detected wavefront fall below a predefined threshold. During the iterative process the bandwidth of the iterative PLL system is gradually decreased to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the detected phase as well as to resolve noise-generated phase inconsistencies.